@WDW1974 asked for charts, so here's another chart.
In case anyone doubts WDW has a growing hotel room occupancy problem that’s tied to theme park ticket prices, the following chart represents the number of empty domestic room nights. (Each year, one hotel room has 365 “available room nights”. Nights that room is unoccupied represents an empty room night.)
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Ten years ago, Disney’s domestic resorts languished in a post-9/11 economy, causing the number of empty rooms to hover around 2 million annually, an all-time high.
To jumpstart WDW, Disney created the a la carte Magic Your Way (MYW) ticket in 2005 to allow guests to select only those options they wanted (or could afford), rather than have to purchase the previous all-inclusive ticket. The new format made multiday vacations more affordable and, bolstered by Disney’s Magic Express (DME), resulted in a vastly improved hotel occupancy rate.
As the economy once again worsened in the late 2000s, Disney offered deep onsite discounts, helping WDW briefly preserve occupancies.
However, these deep discounts impacted Parks & Resorts (P&R) gross margins and, as a result, Disney leadership decided to offer less generous discounts, causing a steep rise in the number of empty rooms.
Coupled with continued aggressive ticket price increases, the number of empty rooms has climbed further, with 2013 setting the dubious company record for most unoccupied hotel nights in a year.
When guests cannot afford both tickets and onsite stays, they either don’t vacation at WDW or don’t stay onsite. WDW attendance is strong and suggests that, for now, they are opting to stay offsite.
Continued price increases will only worsen WDW’s growing problem.
“Perpetual price increase” is not a viable long-term business strategy.
Disney leadership is walking a tightrope and needs to step carefully.
Will they?
Or have they become so entrenched in their thinking that they have failed to correctly diagnose the warning signs.
MyMagic+ was supposed to be the cure. Right now, the cure might very well turn out to be worse than the disease.
